It's not always about money. You put out free software because you're proud of it and hope it can help others. But I've given up on sharing and maintaining open source because of the users' toxic self-entitlement. It's not worth the aggravation.
Bounties are not a good incentive to maintaining high quality open source - in fact it's the opposite. It encourages putting in rarely used functionality that is not in line with the goal of the software. In the cases where adding a feature is warranted, a small bounty rarely comes close to the development time required to implement it.
Even the act of properly vetting pull requests is an extremely time consuming process. Will this contribution affect the stability and performance of the code base? Does it follow the conventions of the project and include comprehensive test cases and documentation?
Micropayment donations are nice in theory but don't work in practice. The handful of projects that are able to self-fund do so only because large corporations support them, not individual users. And even those popular projects do not pay for the development of the the many project dependencies they rely on - without which their software would not be possible.
So I don't have any solutions to free software sustainability. The users of the software derive great benefit, but the producers - not so much. By in large, open source will always rely on the charity of its creators.
Bounties are not a good incentive to maintaining high quality open source - in fact it's the opposite. It encourages putting in rarely used functionality that is not in line with the goal of the software. In the cases where adding a feature is warranted, a small bounty rarely comes close to the development time required to implement it.
Even the act of properly vetting pull requests is an extremely time consuming process. Will this contribution affect the stability and performance of the code base? Does it follow the conventions of the project and include comprehensive test cases and documentation?
Micropayment donations are nice in theory but don't work in practice. The handful of projects that are able to self-fund do so only because large corporations support them, not individual users. And even those popular projects do not pay for the development of the the many project dependencies they rely on - without which their software would not be possible.
So I don't have any solutions to free software sustainability. The users of the software derive great benefit, but the producers - not so much. By in large, open source will always rely on the charity of its creators.